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Verse for verse. Go share on social media

The poets included Javed Akthar, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Vivek Narayanan,Prathibha Nandakumar, among others.

On Saturday, I was in the silicon city of India to read at the Attagalatta Bangluru poetry festival, and weather at 23 C was lovely. The sky was overcast. The breeze, constant, cool. And the hall at the Leela was packed. This is the city's first poetry festival, and the organizers were more than happy because of the crowds.
The poets included Javed Akthar, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Vivek Narayanan,Prathibha Nandakumar, among others. There were a great number of youngsters in the crowd, mostly girls. A few were writers themselves, or aspirants. To my relief, the larger part of the audience were just readers. This is good news at a time when some of us were beginning to wonder if the days of poetry were over along with the birth of the Facebook. To my mind, the prevalence of social media amounts after a fashion to a dumbing down of poetry, because publishing is no longer dependent on quality, but on the number of shares you can garner. This is not to deny the good that the social media has done for writing which otherwise might have never seen the light of day.
It was the great literary critic, George Steiner, who said that we live in the world of epilogue, the world after the word. This was in the context of the raging fashion of the 80s, Deconstruction, set off by the works of critics like Rolland Barthes and Derrida. While Deconstruction helped to bring out the subtext, and the various other texts that could be read into a work, Steiner who was a classist, believed in the primacy of the meaning of the text itself. He feared in one way or the other, Deconstruction would lead to a culture of multiplicity, an array of choices for the consumer, where one reading of the text was as good as the next. In effect that would mean a general devaluation in literature and the arts. In passing, Steiner also berated the cult of Beckham over the cult of the Bard, Shakespeare, which has, as he dreaded, come to pass in his own lifetime. By Beckham he meant not so much as the player's skills as his body and fashion cult. The consumerist aspects of the star.
A few years down, the problem is even more complex. The classic work, by Svetlana Alexievich, the Belorussian journalist who won the Nobel Prize in literature earlier this year, Second-Hand Time, is a collection of voices that lament with horror and nostalgia the days of the Stalinist state, which for long survived the demise of the founder. When in 1991, the USSR disintegrated under the careful supervision of Gorbachov, the withering of the communist faith, no matter how terrifying, had been a spiritual substitute to religion, and had ended up orphaning whole parishes. Stalin was the equivalent of a secular Christ. In Russia, they banned books for sure, but they loved books, too. In fact, the early 20th century saw a burst of writing that is first rate in quality. Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akmatova, Osip Mandelstram, Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, to name just a few modernists. All of them had a terrible time; exiled or starved, isolated or tortured, they still wrote, were read in secret, or memorized line by line, and now sold in their millions in Russia. To cut that story short, Svetlana's book despite its subtext of muted, mournful criticism, nevertheless says those years of terror, mystically, were more meaningful than the present days of hedonism, when consumption is a major depleting force of all intellectual drive. Faith gives a purpose to live.
India is a far cry from Russia in terms of its creative history. The regional languages like Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam still produce meritorious literature. What's lacking is encouragement in translations.
The English Speaking Republic of India is another matter altogether. It has more or less killed poetry as the middle class is not yet refined enough to turn themselves into a critical mass of readers. A great number of practitioners of the art of poetry have switched to fiction, because more people tend to read it, and there's more money in it as well. All the more reason why the AttaGalatta poetry festival in Bangalore is a good thing to happen. I came across, a young Story Teller, Vikram Sridhar, who said that is what he does for a profession: Tell stories. I can't think of any other city in India, where a man declares his job as story-telling. And he said he charged for his sessions.
Very good, I thought, as I waited to cross the road back to my hotel right across Leela. I had to wait for long. Very long. Because of the traffic. That's another story, or perhaps a poem, waiting in lovely Bangalore to cross the road, so you can set it down on a page-- if only the cars ceased.
C. P. Surendran is a former editor-in-chief of DNA newspaper, a novelist and poet